My husband and I have traveled together since the time we met in July 2007. We began as tourists, traveling for pleasure, visiting places out of curiosity. We became more serious travelers when we bought an RV, rented out our condos, and cruised through forty-nine American states, nine Canadian provinces, and six Mexican states. It’s all chronicled in the book Carolina: Cruising to an American Dream. The RV gave us the wherewithal to become more than tourists. We became explorers, adventurers, and even pilgrims.
An Explorer
is defined as a person who combs an area for discovery. When we became Elite
Members of Thousand Trails (a nationwide network of campgrounds) and upgraded
our RV to a 37.5-foot motorhome towing a dinghy, we stayed three to four weeks
at a place. This gave us the chance to explore an area more completely. I would
research the places nearby and schedule daily explorations of the areas within
three hours of our base camp.
In Ontario, Canada,
for example, we saw all four different faces of the province: a government hub in
Ottawa, a bustling metropolitan center in Toronto, a famous tourist spot (Niagara),
and the rural town where we were camped. In Europe, we got to go to three
countries from our base in the small town of Oberstaufen in Germany. The trains allowed us to
visit Switzerland (St. Gallen), Lichtenstein (Vaduz), and Innsbruck (Austria).
An Adventurer, on the other hand, is a person who
has, or seeks, activities or places for excitement or an unusual experience,
despite the risks they may entail. I must admit that Bill is more of an
adventurer than I am. He used to scuba dive, ski, fly a plane, etc. I just play
with my smartphone or laptop, an armchair sort of a girl. I’ve tried playing tennis and pickleball, but
they didn’t like me. Does riding the helicopter in Kauai or taking our RV to
the Arctic Circle in the Yukon count?
When we
stumbled upon the Worthington Glacier on the road to Valdez, Alaska, Bill went up to climb it while I
stayed behind, scared I might hurt myself or be frozen. When we went with his
high school friends for a reunion in Crested Butte, Colorado, he went wild river rafting with his
friends while I stayed behind to write about the reunion instead. At Grandfather’s Mountain near the Blue
Ridge Parkway, Bill negotiated
the Mile-High Swinging Bridge while I took his photo.
A Pilgrim is another kind of traveler. This is
a person who journeys, especially a long distance, to some sacred place as an
act of devotion or even as an original settler. Once, being both Catholics, we
diverted from our planned itinerary to Minnesota and turned west instead of
north to visit the Grotto of the Redemption in the
northeastern corner of Iowa. It was off the beaten path, but we wanted to see the complex of nine
grottos made from forty-three different kinds of gems individually gathered and
built entirely by the hands of three men.
A friend and
I became accidental pilgrims in Eastern Europe. We were in Razlog, Bulgaria visiting
a beautiful Eastern Orthodox Church in nearby Bansko when she suddenly had a
yearning to find a Catholic Church. The nearest one was in Skopje, Macedonia,
three and a half hours away, where Mother Teresa was born. We hired a taxi, prayed
at the Chapel attached to her house, and visited the Church of the Black
Madonna where she heard her calling at 18 in Letnice, Kosovo, an hour and a
half away. The way home was through Nis, Serbia, birthplace of the first
Christian Roman Emperor and Saint, Constantine the Great.